a day in the life: TEDA

Life in TEDA has been busy so far. I got in late yesterday afternoon, had two tutoring sessions with children yesterday evening, with minimal time to lesson plan, a demo class to a corporation this afternoon, a sort of meet and greet with an adult I'll be tutoring this afternoon and then my two tutoring children this evening. I'm not teaching all that many hours per week here, but I am teaching every day. That in itself I'd be ok with (accumulated time off is great), but my teaching hours are all spread out throughout the day. I have adults midday pretty much every day and children every evening, so I really can't go anywhere or do anything. Saturdays are my only option for exploration because I don't have anything until 5pm. We'll see how long this takes to drive me crazy...

I was thinking about a field trip to Tienanmen Square this Saturday morning and I asked my TA if she wanted to come but she declined. And discouraged me from going as well. Apparently it will be crazy on a Saturday and there's not that much to see anyway. She said she'd be up for a different adventure though, so I am now in search of anything else to do in the near vicinity. There's an art museum we passed yesterday that I want to check out, but I don't think we need an entire day for that. TEDA does have some fun and random public art that I saw today though.

The whole TA thing is kind of interesting for me. She was initially presented to me as a teaching assistant. When I got here she seemed to be more of a personal assistant to my school owner and now sometimes to me. She opens my car doors and shuts them for me and things like that. It's kind of strange, like she's almost trying to take care of me. We had some dirty dishes in the sink from our dinner last night that I washed today and she was so surprised at a foreigner washing dishes that she took a picture. What on earth have other foreigners been like?! She's fun though, and teaching me Chinese and we seem to have a lot in common, which makes for a good roommate situation.

My students here seem ok as well. I have a boy that is in middle school and absolutely amazing. His English is phenomenal. Better than my TA's or my school owner's. He cracks me up, when I was first asking him what he's interested in he tells me politics and history. Unfortunately I am interested in neither of those things, soooo on a compromise we are reading Anne Frank. I also have a middle school aged girl whose English is quite good, but not on the same level as the boy's. She has traveled all over the world and I am definitely jealous.

As far as the adults go, my demo class today was to an international software company. I ended up there through a contract with the government. The company saw my resume and decided I was too young though, so this demo class was my make or break, no word yet on how that went. They gave me no direction or level of my audience ahead of time, so I taught a class on marketing. Turns out I was teaching a bunch of managers in a technology department. They had no concept of marketing and were not participatory at all, quite different from my business English class in Songyuan.

Outside of them (if they decide to keep me), I have the middle school boy's father, who is actually very high up in the labor union here. He seems nice enough, but he has a very low level of English right now. Very different from anyone I have taught so far. Apparently I made a very good impression on his son yesterday, because he brought me a gift, a China tea set, this afternoon.

So I spent my Valentine's Day with a bunch of students, my TA and my boss. This morning my TA goes, "Happy Valentine's Day. I got you a present. It's breakfast." Made me laugh. We cracked up over our Valentine's dinner too; our school owner and another caretaker type guy that works for him made us dinner because they both cook and we don't. Nothing wrong with men cooking for two women on Valentine's Day!